Damon Williams

Associate Dean and Chief Diversity Officer at The Graduate School

Northwestern University

Damon joined Northwestern from Emory University, where he served as the inaugural Director of Diversity, Community, and Recruitment in the James T. Laney Graduate School. At Emory, he created the EDGE-Emory Diversifying Graduate Education Office that supports diversity and inclusion initiatives for graduate education. He also partnered with the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) to create Emory SOAR program, a research program for HBCU undergraduate students.

Damon has a strong background in developing partnerships and pipelines which serve to recruit and retain underrepresented minority students to graduate education with programs funded by the Mellon Foundation, the National Institute of Health (NIH), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Damon sits on the Board of Directors for the National Conference for Race and Ethnicity (NCORE), Medical Moguls, and Hill Harper’s “Making Your Destiny”, a non profit targeted for at-risk youth. He holds a Bachelors of Science from Xavier University of Louisiana, MBA from Fontbonne University, Masters of Management from Tulane University, and additional graduate certificates from Emory University, and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.